Monday, 23 February 2015

Earlier this month, the long-awaited
re-issues of Kylie’s first four albums on PWL were finally released after a delay of three months. Each album is now available
in three collector editions, but the most interesting, without doubt,
are the ones that include the DVDs of original promo videos, bonus
material and BBC footage. Although I had seen some of the material
on VHS when I was researching my biography of Kylie in 2002, and later, on the DVD releases of Kylie Greatest Hits and Ultimate Kylie, for which I co-wrote the album liners, they were never in such outstanding
picture and sound quality as they are on the new PWL re-issues. Intrigued to find out more, I recently spoke to video director, editor and restorer Dan Hall about the challenges of the work involved in
restoring Kylie.

What
brought you to work on the Kylie videos for the PWL reissues?

I
was first approached at the conception stage by PWL archivist Tom
Parker. He had followed the work of my company Pup Limited on the
Classic Doctor Who DVD range. I had commissioned the
high-profile DVD range for several years. The releases contained
restored episodes as well as new documentaries. Tom’s original idea
was to apply the Classic Doctor Who DVD model onto the Kylie
releases.

Are
you a fan of the Kylie PWL era?

Indeed
I am. I must be one of the few PWL / Springsteen / Suede fans in the
UK! Pete and the team made some absolutely smashing melodies, and it
has been an honour to be a part of bringing them back to audiences.
The PWL concert a couple of Christmases back was one of the best
nights of my life. I lost my voice for two weeks after.

Restoring the videos then, must have been like a work of love.

Absolutely
a work of love. We were unable to go down the same restoration route
as for the Doctor Who DVDs because of budget. And so Pup
developed a whole new series of restoration techniques. These were
designed more for short-form content like music videos as opposed to
longer-form television shows. There
is always some more work to do, always another piece of drop-out that
can be improved. The more you fix these things the more errors begin
to show. And of course nobody wants to let content out that could be
improved. So you do go on and beyond budget, but with a willing
heart.

Did you play a part in finding any of the footage,
like the original and location-based versions of Got
To Be Certain,
or were these in the PWL archive?

All
the footage was sourced and found by Tom Parker whose passion for the
project drove us on. He has a fantastic knowledge of Pete Waterman’s
legendary barn in which many of the masters are stored. Tom had the
key knowledge about different versions of videos and where they might
be found. We
did have one fortunate find towards the end of production. A couple
of videos had been missing from Tom’s original masters delivery.
When getting these transferred we uncovered superior quality versions
of many of the titles. By this point we all but finished restoration,
so much of the earlier work was scrapped. But the time was by no
means wasted as our improved techniques could now benefit the new
masters.

Was
there any other major restoration work done apart from what has been seen in the Pup showreel?

Absolutely!
Every single one of the videos averaged two or three days’ work.
The promo only shows the “greatest hits”. Although these videos
aren’t hugely old, it is alarming how quickly videotape begins to
fail. Information is lost causing what is called “drop-out”.
These are brief flashes of lost data, usually shown as a bar of
colour. There are also dirt and scratches which we remove. Grading
is always controversial. This is where you alter the colours in the
picture to give a mood. It can have a massive effect on audience’s
perceptions. For example Loco-Motion was too yellow, which we
fixed resulting in a more natural skin-tone. On Je Ne Sais Pas
Pourquoi we took a gamble and completely regarded it. The
original was super-80s in colouring and brightness, and yet it was
set in 1940s France. So the re-grade played on this with a more brown
austerity grade to complement the fantastic sets. For
Finer Feelings we found the beautiful photography was
undermined by a low-contrast master. So the blacks were pumped down a
tad to give it more gusto. Out of all her videos this is the one that
I feel deserves our reappraisal most. The photography and editing
really is first rate.

What
can you tell me about the restoration process and did you have any
say on what videos should be included and ones that shouldn’t?

Tom
and PWL very much led the editorial of the release, although of
course they were happy with my input. But frankly they were one and
the same. We all wanted to make a definitive set of releases that
showed the passion of those who had put it together. As
for the restoration process, we vestigated investing in automated
technology. But it was quickly apparent that it was no match for
careful human eyes and hand-crafted fixes. Music videos are
available, pirated for free all over the internet. If we are going to
persuade people to part with their money we have to provide something
special. And I do not think pumping a video through a rough,
computerised clean-up is going to cut the mustard.

Were
there any videos that you were given to work on that you felt
wouldn’t benefit from restoration?

Every
single video was restored. Even later ones like Word Is Out,
which had very little dropout, suddenly had huge green splodges on
several frames. Each video was their own challenge with their own
unique set of solutions.

How
good or bad condition was the BBC footage that you worked on? Did the
BBC give you any other footage that is not included in the sets?

The
BBC material was in okay condition. The sound isn’t fantastic on
some of the Wogan episodes, but I’m not sure that’s a bad
thing. Part of the texture of archive is its faults, and sometimes
you make a judgement call to leave things as they are. In the case of
Wogan the music wasn’t replaced as people are watching it
for the archive, rather than the song. However,
almost all the BBC footage had a lot of what we call noise. This is
lots of tiny dots that look a bit like a slightly off-tuned
television. So we cleared those away and gave the colours a bit more
punch. Everything
that the BBC provided for us was placed on the discs. And great it is
too! I loved the old Top of the Pops graphics so much that
they were recreated for the albums’ four promos.

Who
initiated the restoration work on the videos? Did you have any say in it because you felt that the
original videos could do with restoration?

It
was Tom Parker who first approached me, and he had previously done
fantastic work for both companies. Without realising it I’d been
buying Tom’s fantastic reissues for quite a while! I imagine the
whole thing was driven first by him. Later on Ian Usher took over
the reigns and led the project to completion. I
have a lot of self-interest in wanting the videos to be restored! So
quite rightly I wouldn’t have a say in whether they should be done
or not.

Most of the video promos have been released before on
various DVDs. Did you wonder why they had not been
restored to the picture quality you have now given them?

I
can absolutely understand why, because there may not be the demand.
But now videos are pirated all over the internet labels and artists
have to take quality to the next level if they are going to persuade
people to part with their money. This will hopefully encourage people
back to official sources and off YouTube. In
addition, a scratchy and unattractive video does undermine the song
and the audience’s perception of the material. We do live in a very
visual world, even those of us in music.

Would
you say they are near enough Blu-Ray quality? They look like they
are.

That’s
very kind of you to say! The first part of Pup’s restoration
process was to boost the standard-definition masters up to
high-definition. This is where very computer software “guesses”
the extra pixels that are needed by an HD picture. Our restoration
work was then carried out on these new HD masters. It was only the
very end of the process where the HD was scaled back to standard
definition for DVD. From your question I’m guessing our specially
developed restoration technique worked!

Are
there any more videos and footage that could be restored?

Oh,
goodness yes! I look at the wonderful work of artists like Kate Bush,
David Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys and long to get my hands on their
material. Bush’s Cloudbusting is a stunning video, but it
desperately needs cleaning. Same goes for the wonderful Pet Shop Boys
feature-length concept video, It Couldn’t Happen Here. Bowie’s
Ashes to Ashes is iconic, but covered in dropout. And
Queen… who wouldn’t want to get those fantastic promos looking
sharp?

What
visual and audio quality were the original promos in?

The
audio wasn’t brilliant, and a tad muffled and quiet. But this was
fixed with wonderful new audio masters from PWL. Visually
the conditions varied a lot. Loco-Motion, Got To Be Certain
and Never Too Late were particularly bad. The PWL masters of
If You Were With Me Now had an eight second section that was
unplayable. For this I sourced another copy from a different source
and compiled a new master. What
this showed was that often it is believed that somebody else is
looking after the master. The TV companies think the labels are, the
labels think the agents are, the agents think the producers are, etc.
If we are not careful we’re going to lose some of the iconic promos
of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. On
Better the Devil You Know we discovered one single frame of a
shot that had been left in by accident way back when. So this was
removed as it is “illegal” for broadcast. There’s an exclusive!
The restored Better the Devil You Know video is actually 1/25
second shorter than the original.

How
painstaking was the restoration and what were the primary technical
processes/tools you used?

Very
painstaking! Each video has at least ten passes, and for some we slow
it down to 50% in order to allow us to extrapolate every possible
piece of visual data. I won’t go into exactly what we use or how we
use it – it’s our magic formula! – but suffice to say the
technique was developed by Pup using a Computing Science PhD wizard.

Is re-mixing sound for a
DVD a completely different process to the remix of a CD set and did
you work on any of the CDs?

Sometimes one can get too close
to a project and forget that at the end there is a consumer – and
hopefully one that is smiling. This is a brand new restoration
process that Pup has developed especially for music videos. I
sincerely hope that we’ll get to cast our magic on more titles. The
sound was provided to us from PWL, remastered and sounding fantastic.
For DVD we simply put a small amount of compression to keep it from
going too loud. But really on the sound the hard work was done by Tom
and PWL. All we had to do was match the old sound to the new. That
said, it was tougher than it first seemed as the sound on those
videos didn’t run at a consistent speed. These errors had to be
forced back into the remastered audio in order to keep things in
sync!

Was
there a specific rationale for the video tracks that were chosen for
the new DVDs?

From
my understanding the only rationale was: “Is it relevant” and “Is
it available”. With those two simple criteria PWL and Cherry Red
were able to pull together a brilliant set of releases.

Do
you know if Kylie has seen any of the restored videos? If so what was
her reaction?

I
don’t know whether she has, although I’m sure Pete would have
made sure she knew about them. As an artist I’m sure she’s wary
about spending too much time looking back, when there is an
expectation always to move forward. That said, I hope it reminds her
how much people value and enjoy her fantastic back catalogue.

Wednesday, 4 February 2015

Just over four and a halfdecadesago,
in April 1969, I was working at Caffyns in Eastbourne, when RCA
Records released Elvis Presley’s new album. On the day of release,
during my lunch hour, I walked into town and headed to the record
department at WHSmith, where they still had listening booths where one
could ask for records to be played without any intention to purchase
until the staff got irritated and chucked you out. By the time I got
there to listen to Elvis, the soundtrack album from his 1968
NBC-TV Special, there was only one copy left.

You wouldn’t
have to be reading Elvis Monthly or be among Elvis’s
community of British fansto
realise that the TV special had received unprecedented significance
in the music press and elsewhere.
Most of us had heard about it, which at the time, was being hailed as
Elvis’s comeback from his Hollywood years to once again retain his
position at the fore of popular music. Anyone who had seen his last
picture Speedway, would know and understand why every Elvis
fan and music journalist was genuinely excited about the special, and
why it was so important to see the show that had all America raving,
but what most couldn’t understand was why we had to wait over a
year to see it on British TV.

What was
perhaps strange is that when it did finally get an airing in the UK,
on New Year’s Eve 1969, with a title change to The Fabulous
Elvis, it was relegated to BBC2, which most people didn’t have
access to, as its 625-line colour broadcasts could only be received
on newer TV sets, so most people didn’t have it. I was living at
home with my parents at the time, and they certainly didn’t. Like
many other households in the UK at that time, our TV could only
receive black-and-white broadcasts for what, at the time, were the
two main channels, ITV and BBC1, which meant that not only did I have
to wait over a year before the Elvis special was broadcast, but I
wasn’t even able to see it when it was. I had to wait a further six
weeks after its showing on BBC2, until it was repeated on BBC1 on
Wednesday 4 February 1970 at 8.00pm. But why the hold up in showing
it in the first place! It seems Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom
Parker, was partially to blame.

According to a
cutting in the New Musical Express on 1 March 1969, “There
are still no plans for the special to be screened in this country.
BBC-TV executives have expressed great interest in the show from the
outset - and because of the Corporation’s special relationship with
NBC-TV, asked to see a copy of the film, with a view to purchasing
British screening rights. However the copy has still not arrived in
this country. The NME understands that rights to the special
are held by Elvis and his management, and the delays in making it
available for world distribution is primarily the responsibility of
the Presley organisation. Meanwhile BBC-TV is maintaining its effort
to secure the film.” And then two months later, in May, the NME
ran a story that fans would definitely see the special sometime
in the near future. “Colonel Tom Parker revealed this week that he
has now signed the necessary clearance, enabling for it to be seen in
this country. Both BBC and ITV are interested in securing it, and
says the Colonel, the show will go to the highest bidder.”

In the end,
when the show finally made it onto BBC1, 45 years ago this week, it was
very exciting to think that after all the ifs, buts and maybes, I
would finally get to see it, along with the thousands of other
British fans, who either missed it when it was on BBC2 or couldn’t
watch it because, like me, their families didn’t have the right
kind of TV set. And in those days, before we had the luxury of video
recorders and Sky boxes, we couldn’t tape it to watch again later.
We would have to wait for it to be repeated and the likelihood of
that was, well unlikely.

I watched it
with my parents at home, on their old black-and-white TV, along with
my sister and her husband, and after the end credits had finished
rolling, I remember my dear late father saying, “Shame he didn’t
have guests on like Tom Jones does!” Quite disgusted with the
comment, I told him, I was now going to my room to play the album at
full volume, and was immediately asked why, “You have just watched
it on TV... don’t you think we have had enough Elvis for one
night!” Guess what my answer was!

ABOUT

I have been a published writer of biography for over 25 years writing about celebrities I admire and feel passionate about. The idea of this blog is to complement my website with posts on related topics that are not available on my site or elsewhere.